Finally!

Oh hush

"And IE is still illegally bundled with the OS when you purchase it. If you purchase it, it is not FREE. Only idiots claim that something you paid cash for is FREE. Or, Microsoft salesmen."

This blah-blah really pisses me off. Where are the hordes of moaners demanding that Apple remove Safari from Mac OS, or that Linux distros come without a browser of choice preinstalled? If MS want to put their browser inside their OS, fine.

The choice we *should* have is which OS to buy, not whether or not it contains a browser. The MS tax is one area where MS can indeed get bent.

It's not that bad

There's a lot of historical hate on this thread, some justified, and some not. Someone called IE9 the slowest of the available browsers, for example, when that's clearly bullshit. IE9 beats the latest Chrome in Sunspider on my desktop, and seeing something from Microsoft get to 95% on Acid3 is a reassuring sign that they're moving in the right direction.

Sure, IE9 is a massive Chrome rip-off, just as IE7 was a massive Firefox rip-off, but all that "inspiration" made IE a better browser, and that's what we really need, for the old versions to die and the new versions to be decent. No, you won't use it, because you're one of the holy Opera Chosen, but gajillions of end users will, so it's important.

At the end of the day, the browser IE9 should be most compared to is IE8. Is the new default browser for MS platforms better than the old one? Yes, in every single important respect, absolutely.

In fairness to Opera

Bad design???

The bloody things withstood a force 9 quake! What the hell is wrong with you people?

When the quake hit, they lost primary power, so they dropped to diesel generators. Unfortunately, there was this rather inconvenient tsunami (you may have heard of it) that swamped them and took out the generators. They weren't just ignoring the buildup, you tit - they couldn't do a damn thing about it until backup arrived.

But it's good to know that Captain Hindsight is alive and well, spouting ill-informed bullshit everywhere it's needed. I just love your signoff. Never mind the thousands of nuclear specialists in Japan - you know best.

You are irradiated all the time

You constantly absorb background radiation from your environment, just by standing on the face of the Earth. This is all perfectly normal and natural. What they're saying is that the radiation exposure from the minor plant leak is equivalent to 9 months worth of natural background radiation.

So a higher dose than you'd normally get, but small enough that it's not likely to seriously hurt you. Which is good!

Thank you El Reg

For not reporting on this story in the same hysterical "mushroom cloud" way that the mainstream media has. All I've heard from them is "Aaaa, nuclear, it's gonna kill everyone, radiation!" They keep shoving the death toll and the nuclear accident together in the same sentence, as if they were related, and it's completely irresponsible.

Well yes, I know that

I know what Ad Astra means. My comment was a game reference. On the Spectrum there was a game called Ad Astra, and the tagline scrawled across the cassette case was "To the stars!" It always used to amuse me. Great game, incidentally.

A Happy Coincidence

It got me started

The original Spectrum 48K got me started on computers at a very tender age, mucking around in BASIC. I've now got three of them, a ZX81, the very same 48K (still working) and a Spectrum plus, with the solid keyboard. Think I'll dig out the ZX81 tomorrow and hook it into a big widescreen TV in honour of its birthday. I owe a lot to those little black blocks with the gigantic overheating power bricks.

T-Mobile will not do this in-store

I refused to give them CC details, so I tried in store. They accepted that I was who I said I was, accepted that the contract was mine (the contract you need to be 18 to sign...), and then asked me for credit card details...

FUCK OFF!

It wouldn't be so bad, except I wasn't trying to look at b00bies. They blocked a bloody programmer reference!

Errr...

"Especially not when it can wait 18 months then complain to OfCom (or whatever replaces it) that BT has a Monopoly on FTTP, using skill-sets and everything else it earned from the Post Office sell-out, and how they should be able to use that infrastructure for free."

Or perhaps their existing co-ax infrastructure doesn't *need* upgrading, given how much faster it already is than the copper loops BT is replacing....

Blah blah iPad 2 blah blah

Oh piss off

I'm fairly certain that my cousin had *exactly* this toy when he was a kid, or the early 90s equivalent. He's pretty skinny, and I was too. It was eating all the pies at college that made me porky, not a toy that I barely remember.

Oh, and kids don't buy their own food, retards. So unless the parents are somehow being affected by this toy, your argument is bullshit.

I can believe...

...all the rumours that suggest the hardware will be brought up to current iPhone standards. That just makes sense. But carbon fibre? High DPI display? Not sure about those. Such additions would cut into their massive profit margins, and it's not like they can price the iPad any higher and keep a straight face.

Oh man, why didn't I think of that before?

Or you could just

Sod the games console, go upstairs and shag. Jesus.

I always thought the Wii MP controller in its big rubber sheath looked more like a sex toy than the Move. Especially in black. When I got my black Wii, I almost immediately started referring to it as the Wii Dildo.

Oh boy, here we go again

Will you Opera fanboys please get over the fact that some of us like Firefox? On the desktop, I prefer the Firefox browser, so Firefox is the browser I want to sync with. Opera Mobile is an excellent browser, but I do not use Opera on the desktop, so its sync capabilities are useless to me.

Also, Firefox syncs more than bookmarks. Being able to turn my desktop off, fire up my phone and reopen the tab I was just reading is very, very useful.

Been using the beta for a while

Beta 5 is a welcome and vast improvement for Android, less so for Maemo. The Maemo version works, but seriously chugs.

This beta does fix one very important bug - in previous versions, when you moved the app to the SD card, it didn't move your user profile, so that would eventually fill your free space with cached content. When you upgrade to beta 5, refresh the SD card install and that will be fixed. The install seems smaller in this version too, down to around 12MB on my phone, before user data.

Beta 5 on Android, from using it this morning, is also a LOT faster than previous versions. As fast as the native browser? Nope. But fast enough to use, and if you value Firefox's functionality (sync is worth it for me), it's a nice little system.

BTW, the tone of the article, especially the headline, seems to make out at first like this is a final release. I know you mention it's a beta, but the headline and intro don't come across that way. Just my 2p. Anyway, recommended upgrade if you're with the betas already, and if you haven't used them yet because they just chuffed way too much (and I agree, they did), then give this one a shot.

Agreed, sir!

The iPad is the least impressive supergadgety thing I've used in yonks. For all its size and the pretty screen, there is little escaping the fact that it is a very large, very expensive iPod. And I don't like iPods much to begin with.

And I have seen 5x more Kindles on the train to work than I have iPads. Actually, I see at least twice as many actual working honest-to-God-I'm-trying-to-get-something-done-here-turn-your-fucking-music-down-your-Apple-branded-headphones-are-incredibly-shit laptops on the train as I do iPads. My 17" brick included.

You're not a Trekkie are you?

"Eh? People do use Nokia - more so than any other phone company. And indeed, it would be refreshing to see Nokia for once, rather than advertising for Apple yet again. Or do you mean there's something different about phones to coke, and you'd object to seeing an Iphone or whatever there just as much?"

I was actually thinking more along the lines of plausibility. Are the filmmakers seriously trying to tell me that NOKIA are running the planetary communications network in the 23rd Century? That time when currency may/may not have been abolished, depending on your continuity. When we have one global government, no war, universal literacy, and capitalism is essentially dead?

My.

Arse.

The problem with product placement like that is that it just doesn't fit in with the environment. Seeing a Nokia in a Star Trek film is like seeing one of the soldiers in Braveheart brandishing an MP5. It's really jarring and stupid and pulls you out of the story.

But as I said, there are many and better reasons to hate Star Trek 11.

Ugh

I don't mind products being in a film if they're just there. If someone is in a movie drinking a Coke, fine. People drink Coke, this is ordinary. But there is definitely a line to cross. Seeing a Nokia in a Star Trek film, for example, though there are many, many other reasons to loathe Star Trek 11.

As for Apple, I remember what they did to Blade Trinity. Now THAT was blatant!

"Ooh, I just love killing vampires while listening to my iPod!" BASTARDS.

Last time you checked

You were wrong!

Fresh install I did last week had 200MB of updates since the ISO was last refreshed. And this isn't a fresh install, it's an update.

Now if we're going to talk fresh installs, I installed an XP machine the other week and after SP3 it still had 90 updates to run. A Win7 machine typically has 50 updates after install, and that's long before installing any actual useful software, which a Linux install comes with out of the box.

You know, I'd almost forgotten that one

How ridiculous is it

How ridiculous is it for a drawing of a nude person to be tasteful, but a photo of the same person to be obscene? This pathetic imposition of morality from certain US-based companies is starting to grate...

*Cough*

I could be a dick and point out that you can already enable this kind of behaviour in Firefox with one of a number of add-ons, but I would rather ask why the hell you would want this kind of behaviour in the first place. Hiding the URL bar for inexperienced users is just begging for a phishing attack.